Summer of Self-Hatred: A Teens of Denial 10-Year Retrospective

Design by Sophie Parrish

By Declan Ireland

It’s 2016 and you’re young—somehow younger than you already are. Everything has this heightened breathing quality, so much so that it takes on an awful animism. The world, your friends, your lover: all of it is powerful and wrong. Except you, my young friend, you have the distinct privilege of not being powerful but being just as wrong, more wrong even. Impotent and wrong, the culmination of your powerlessness and wrongness taking shape in the looming inevitability of the end of high school and beginning of the rest of your life, a terrible abyss surmountable only by an enormous leap of faith that finds shape and rhythm in Car Seat Headrest’s Teens of Denial (2016). 

Teens of Denial was the product of an incredibly prolific period of songwriting for Toledo, its core both the fruit and the seed of the his entire lyrical corpus, epitomizing the war against the self waged constantly throughout his music, finally brought herein to a concentrated head like an awful conversation or a loaded bullet. Teens of Denial has now officially turned ten. Ample time and space has cooled those heated alloys and brought the final shape of the record into focus. It is then perhaps only fitting and proper that we return to take a look at what sets this record aside, both in structure and style, from the enormous bulk of Toledo’s discography, to tackle what has been anointed by teens and critics alike as one of the greatest garage rock records of all time.

During the period from 2011 to 2016, Will Toledo produced a frankly enormous amount of music, averaging about one album a year, only slowing upon the start of the Teens of Denial production cycle, trading loveable roughshod early releases for crisp, precise production levels previously unheard of in his body of work.

Teens of Denial was Toledo’s first album with a full band and the first to make use of a full production studio and all its amenities. As Toledo himself put it when talking with Observer, “[I wanted] to make a record you could put on at parties, so the kid who doesn’t want to be there could at least have some good music.” The boost in energy is considerably clear, CSH shifting from the tinny, techno-adjacent music of their previous years into the nearly conventional garage rock that they would never quite replicate again on later albums, the outfit notoriously never one to linger in one spot for too long.

Still, one quality will always ring true in CSH’s music no matter how far they may stride: Toledo’s voice. Toledo bashes relentlessly against the bars of his cage, welcoming cracks and warbles as he pushes further and further into the higher register. This very resistance to compromise, so typical of his music, all the more accentuates the desperate sincerity it exudes, evoking a need to express experience above all else, pushing beyond technical ability, aesthetic, and even clarity at times. Even on later LPs where drummer Andrew Katz and guitarist Ethan Ives are welcomed into the vocal fold, when Toledo makes himself known it is impossible to miss and, since their shift to prog-adjacent rock more evocative of David Bowie than The Strokes, his voice has become one of the only truly discernable characteristics all CSH albums share. In Teens of Denial this is at its absolute best, Toledo’s vocals screeching in harmony with the sharp guitars and blaring trumpets heard throughout.

Despite the almost uncomfortable rawness, CSH still sustains a near perfect use of tone and feel. To listen to Teens of Denial is to bear witness to a perfectly cultivated live set, each ordered track leaving the listener exactly where they need to be in energy and emotion. Whether on frantic tracks or meditative ones, each is like a wave crashing against your sandcastle, swelling in energy, impacting, and receding again until eventually it must all come down. Toledo’s knack for sonic momentum always finds a way to undermine the fragile foundation of one’s emotional landscape. The tension is brought to culmination on the two inextricably eleven o’clock numbers, “Cosmic Hero,” and, “The Wreck of the Costa Concordia.” To me, these tracks make the album. Just as The Mollusk might not be complete without “Ocean Man,” or This is Happening without “Dance Yrself Clean,” these tracks are each to their respective records the point upon which the listener’s overall experience hinges—tone setter, climax, or conclusion. The thrashing resistance of  “Cosmic Hero” gives way to dull acceptance in “Costa”’s first half, which itself peels back to reveal renewed energy, reminiscent of earlier tracks like the unrelenting “Vincent” or brutal and confessional “Destroyed by Hippie Powers.” “Cosmic Hero” jitters and ascends, fighting with itself all the way up until the inevitable fall, past which, slowly but surely, Toledo’s narrator may regain his footing in twinkling keys, like stars dodging in and out from behind the clouds, a wistful vantage point from which Toledo may reflect in the final two tracks. On “Connect the Dots” and “Joe Goes to School,” the teenage angst has not subsided. If anything, it has been bolstered by experience, but is now perhaps in a different key, bearing a new tongue-in-cheek self-awareness that reveals Toledo has garnered a deeper wisdom, some truth of life. He quotes a “little boy” in “Connect the Dots” saying, “I’ll be in love with my fits…I’ll be in love with my punches…I’ll punch the heart of everyone,” Toledo now recognizing that what this really was was not a poor hopeless boy at the whims of the universe, but rather an infatuation with suffering, a self-martyrdom itself a frequent subject of Toledo’s writing.

Concluding the record is “Joe Goes to School,” a song that doesn’t ask for much. It’s simple, stripped back, just Toledo and a guitar telling a story about finding a horse, attempting to connect with it, finding “it did not seem interested,” then escaping as a car pulls up nearby. It’s beautiful and murky, as perhaps any musical Irish exit should be. There is no button, no grand finale as in The Scholars or Twin Fantasy. The record simply ends, with little pomp or circumstance. While Toledo’s lyrics are not as morose as they were before, desperation still haunts the scene with this muted expression of the loneliness Toledo evokes. 

At the end of the day, the record is a slice of life, meant in the most literal sense possible. It’s a perfect snapshot of that limping stage between the end of high school and the beginning of college I’m sure many are all too familiar with: the love, the loss, the loathing, everything. It’s the sound of that heavy summer where the whole world feels like it’s ending because, in a way, everything is. The final moments, in my mind, remind the listener of the continuation of things, providing a falling action where many other records might simply explode, leaving the audience to pick up the pieces. In this way, despite all the grief, Teens of Denial leaves off on a positive, almost acquiescent note. Like the first stages of growth following a forest fire, Toledo assures the potential for peace inevitably sprouting from the chaos. This is the fundamental optimism that lives at the core of all of Toledo’s writing. Within all the turmoil he depicts, there is always still an indelible will to live and to change that keeps me coming back over the years. 

Today, the record is CSH’s poster child, and rightfully so. The line it tows between emotional resonance and stylistic stability is not so easy to tread. “Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales” and “Destroyed by Hippie Powers” have undeniably stood the test of time more than any of the other tracks precisely because they are a perfect model of this artistic achievement. They do not linger, as Toledo’s music is so apt to do. There are no lengthy instrumental interludes or spoken-word segments as found elsewhere in the band’s discography. These details, while undeniably a huge part of the music’s charm and resonance, can easily repel an audience on subsequent listens (my mind first goes to “Planet Desperation” off The Scholars, a song which contains perhaps the greatest four minutes of Toledo’s oeuvre, but locks it within the last segment of an almost 19-minute track—the other 15 minutes of bulk, while admittedly beautiful, inevitably leave a listen feeling like a lost cause when one is just looking for a quick hit of catharsis at any given point in a day). Teens of Denial is CSH at its best and most palatable, a perfect in for new listeners, of course followed by Twin Fantasy.

But I must admit, I wasn’t there for theTeens of Denial release. I was eleven and listening to exclusively Panic! At the Disco. I have, however, just passed my own personal five-year Car Seat Anniversary with Twin Fantasy, which caught me like a bullet in the gut right at the end of my sophomore year. I have often told friends CSH is something you “grow out of.” I have said that the songs produced in this era contain feelings that by their very nature are volatile and fleeting, and I still think that might be true. But as time passes and wounds heal, you can listen back, in a sense. There’s a bittersweet sort of nostalgia to me here, the kind strictly reserved for that horrible period—whether it be a year, a month, or even just a week—that burnt you to the ground so that you could be built up again into what you are now, the kind of suffering you know you shouldn’t look back on and yearn for but somehow still do, still return to time and time again, like watching a car crash or a house of cards topple down. When I tell people I listen to Car Seat Headrest, I get embarrassed because, when I say it, I don’t picture myself listening to it but the 16-year-old that is learning how to socialize again after Covid and just got off of a masked production of Little Shop of Horrors. I’m ashamed of him. He’s impulsive, corny, desperate for the approval of others, and yet completely unwilling to play ball and cooperate. But I feel that Car Seat Headrest helps me love him a little more, helps me understand the despair, the shame, the self-hatred he felt. Teens of Denial, and perhaps Car Seat Headrest as a whole, helps me see the way the things he did were, even if he didn’t realize it, sowing the seeds for the new growths that would burgeon into a verdant green patch of woods now all my own.